What the Russians are accused of doing was not only a unique incursion into American democracy, it was also, at its simplest, a highly effective digital-advertising campaign.

Photograph by Eric Thayer / NYT / Redux

A few nights ago, four New York City advertising professionals, two men
and two women, met in secret to talk about Russian interference in the
2016 American election. They asked me not to reveal their names.

I am at liberty to disclose the following: we were in a hip high-rise in
a semi-hip neighborhood in Queens. There was a sweeping view of
Manhattan, a gas fireplace, and a low table strewn with snacks. One of
the men had a beard and the other did not; one of the women had bangs
and the other did not. They all work at the same Manhattan advertising
firm, where they are “creatives,” meaning that they write the ads.

“So, let’s say we come up with a spot for one of our clients,” Bangs
said.

“Let’s not use a real example, O.K.?” No Beard said.

“O.K., hypothetically, let’s say we write a sixty-second commercial for
shoes,” Bangs said. “We get paid for the work, the client sells some
shoes, everyone’s happy. Except it’s still not enough—now we have to
make a video about the video we made, and then we submit that video to
other people in our industry and ask them to reward us for our
brilliance.” These meta-videos are called case studies. Every year,
during advertising awards season, which starts with the Webby Awards, in
May, and ends with the Clio Awards, in September, ad firms submit case
studies to compete in various categories—Best Video Campaign, Best Use
of Machine Learning, Best Branded Editorial Experience. “It’s not
uncommon to spend more time making the case study than you spend writing
the ad itself,” No Bangs said. “It’s insane, but that’s how it works.”

The co-workers have a group text thread called the Trash Patch, so named
“because our texts are full of bizarre emojis and memes and all sorts of
garbage.” Amid the memes, they also text each other links to news
articles. “She, in particular, is obsessed with reading about how
Russian trolls and bots helped get Trump elected,” Beard said, gesturing
toward Bangs.

“I would say ‘extremely knowledgeable,’ ” Bangs said, laughing. “But ‘obsessed’ is also fair. It’s an unbelievable story! Literally, if it
was in a book or a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.” Whenever Bangs read a
new article about the sophistication of Kremlin-aligned troll farms, or
Jeff Sessions’s meetings at the Mayflower Hotel, she texted it to the Trash Patch.

One weekend in October, Beard had an epiphany: what the Russians were
accused of doing was not only a unique incursion into American
democracy, it was also, at its simplest, a highly effective
digital-advertising campaign. He texted the Trash Patch. “Idea: fake
Webbys submission from Russia about how they influenced the election,”
he wrote. The ad industry wanted to reward the most “impactful” and
“disruptive” campaigns of the year; who else had had a more disruptive
impact? “These trolls didn’t have huge budgets, and, frankly, a lot of
them are pretty shitty at Photoshop,” Beard said. “But you can’t deny
the effectiveness.”

“Nobody who knew how marketing works should have been surprised by this result,” a creative said.

YouTube

The creatives assembled a team of volunteers to help them make a Web
site, ProjectMeddle.org, and a
case-study video with swelling string music in the background. “In 2016,
Russia was losing relevance among democracy-obsessed Americans,” the
voice-over begins. “We started by aligning ourselves with a top-tier
influencer as the face of our campaign.” Onscreen, the silhouette of
Donald Trump lurches into the frame. Alleged misdeeds by Russian agents
were translated into case-study clichés. Hacking John Podesta’s Gmail
became “an innovative e-mail strategy.” Disseminating fake news became
“Instead of relying on slow-moving traditional news organizations, we
simply created our own news coverage.” While writing the script, No
Bangs, the copywriter, turned to Bangs, the Russia expert, and asked,
“Would you call Paul Manafort a top-tier influencer, or tier-two?”
“Definitely tier-two,” Bangs said. The case study’s voice-over
continues, “In the end, we didn’t just impact an election. We impacted
an entire nation’s faith in democracy.”

Instead of a “fake Webbys submission,” as Beard had initially
suggested, the creatives decided to submit the case study for real. If
the advertising industry was going to throw itself a series of lavish
parties, they figured, then the people in the room—executives from
various media companies, TV networks, and the very tech platforms whose
integrity had been compromised—should take a break from their
back-slapping and Champagne-toasting and reckon, if only for a few
moments, with their tremendous power and responsibility. “As an
industry, we love taking credit for how influential we are when we do
something good,” Bangs said. “ ‘We helped people register to vote.’ ‘We
raised money for orphanages.’ ‘Our creativity changed millions of
minds.’ O.K., but then those powers fall into the wrong hands, and
suddenly it has nothing to do with us.” She argued that the conditions
that the ad industry exploits and perpetuates—the six-second attention
span, the worship of celebrity, viral hashtags—were the same conditions
that helped Trump bloviate his way to the Presidency. “We taught the
culture to want everything fun and fast and shiny and cheap,” she went
on. “And then we get Trump, and we act shocked.”

“Every marketing professional took one look at those red hats and went, ‘Damn, that’s gonna catch on,’ ” No Bangs said. “Not to mention ‘Make
America Great Again’—what an amazing, concise C.T.A.”

“Call to action,” No Beard explained.

“It’s just really solid copywriting,” No Bangs said. “Nobody who knew
how marketing works should have been surprised by this result.” Brad
Parscale, Trump’s top digital strategist, echoed this sentiment in a
statement last July: “The Trump digital campaign used the exact same
digital marketing strategies that are used every day by corporate
America.”

Late last month, the creatives submitted Project Meddle to the Webby
Awards, in the categories of Best Social Media Campaign and Best Digital
Campaign. In April, they will find out whether they’re among the
nominees. The 2018 elections are coming up, Beard noted, and very few of
the loopholes that were exploited in the last election have been closed.
“If we get nominated, then they have to play our video at the awards
ceremony,” Beard said. “My hope is that, of all the powerful people
sitting in that room, at least a few of them go, ‘What am I doing to make
sure that nothing like this ever happens again?’ ”